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Monday, January 14

Will K.J. Choi Win a Major?

In solid wire-to-wire fashion, K.J. Choi won the Sony Open in Hawaii, his seventh PGA Tour title. The Sony Open doesn’t have the toughest field, but a Tour win is a Tour win. These guys are good, after all.

Choi is winning with more regularity, and his name now pops up as a potential major winner. Jack Nicklaus said keep an eye on K.J. after Choi won Jack’s Memorial tournament last May. Then Choi won again at Tiger’s tournament, the AT&T National in July, completing the Jack-Tiger Slam.

Even before Choi went the distance and won at Waialae Country Club on Sunday, major talk was a part of his Sony press conferences.

Was winning a major one of his goals? Yes, it was.

Why not? Choi seems to have the game for the majors, especially on tough U.S. Open setups. His short game is quite strong. Moreover, K.J. appears to have the resiliency and resolve needed to survive the sterner tests in golf.

Last year Choi finished in a tie for eighth at the British Open at Carnoustie, a good showing. He has four top tens in majors, including a third at the 2004 Masters. Choi's Sony win lifts him two spots to No. 7 in the world ranking.

But here’s the thing. While many players who win multiple times on Tour set a goal to win a major, few actually do.

Choi deserves consideration but isn’t in the can’t-miss category (if there is such a thing) reserved for players such as Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson (before he finally won at the Masters).

I’d love to see K.J. win a major -- he would be a popular champion -- but I’m not at all certain about his chances. He’s just one of many awaiting his turn. And there aren’t many turns.

5 comments
:

Your right on!! K J would be a great choice for winning one this year. He has a fantastic golf swing to copy. The only thing he does from time to time is reach a fraction at the top of his swing (this changes the radius and the arc) but seems to have that under control now, so whoever he is working with must know something about the golf swing!!

One thing I like about KJ is his mechanics. He never wavers from completing his follow through. On his stretch in Sunday to winning the Sony Open he hit down on the ball so hard his divot had to be at least two feet long and three inches deep. You could tell that it pulled on his shoulder and he wanted to stop the club half way through his follow through, but he completed the swing to look like he had made a normal swing...the result, he hit three feet from the pin...as usual.

All true. I do think he belongs at the top of the very short list of honest-to-goodness contenders. Very, very solid. What's not to like? What's funny, to me, anyway, is that he is arguably the best golfer in Texas at the moment (he lives in The Woodlands, near Houston, but, of course, he doesn't speak English.

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